This paper reports the construction of a superconducting linear accelerator as a booster to the 15 UD Pelletron accelerator at Nuclear Science Centre, New Delhi. The LINAC will use superconducting niobium quarter wave resonators as the accelerating element. Construction of the linear accelerator has progressed sufficiently. Details of the entire accelerator system including the cryogenics facility, RF electronics development, facilities for fabricating niobium resonators indigenously, and present status of the project are presented.

An on-line test of the LINAC superbuncher at Nuclear Science Centre has been successfully performed. DC O⁷⁺ beam of nominal energy 92 MeV was accelerated through the superbuncher resonator, operating at a field of 4.54 MV/m. The total energy gain of the beam was measured to be 4.5 MeV. For the pulsed beam test a phase locked bunched beam of O⁷⁺ of nominal energy 92 MeV, FWHM 1.3 ns from the pre-tandem multiharmonic buncher was injected into the superbuncher. By properly adjusting the phase and amplitude of the resonator, the best FWHM of the bunched beam was measured to be 185 ps near the entrance of the first LINAC module. Fully depleted cooled surface barrier detector was used for measuring the time width. In a separate experiment the intrinsic time resolution of the same detector was measured to be 134 ps. Consequently the intrinsic time width of the bunched beam, after correcting for the detector resolution, would be 127 ps. Details of the experiment and results are presented.